Betty Munger's Niantic

Feminist Progressivism in
American Corrections

for the biennial Conference of
Women Working in Corrections and Juvenile Justice
Baltimore, Maryland, 31 October - 3 November 2004

by
Marshall Munger Kerr

T.C. Munger family, 1898

Theodore Chapin Munger of Deansville, New York, then six years old, jumped down from a prairie schooner to settle near Peoria, Illinois, in 1845. Descended from pioneers of Connecticut and New York (one a Battle of Lexington veteran), he joined the Seventeenth Illinois Infantry when the Civil War broke out and stormed the front lines at Vicksburg under U.S. Grant in 1863. A staunch Republican, he co-founded innovative tire and pump factories after the war and stood twice unsuccessfully for mayor in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city then of some 50,000 souls. His wife of 25 years, Grace Breed, daughter of an Illinois schoolteacher, bore him nine children; the fourth of whom, Elizabeth (a.k.a. Bessie) Maria Munger, first saw light in Cedar Rapids the 21st of February, 1883.[1]

Betty Munger took her bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1906. Though barely ten years old itself when she first arrived, the school's international reputation already shone; her contemporaries or immediate predecessors as students included: the future astronomer, Edwin Hubble; future historian, Carter Woodson; and future Nobel Laureates in Physics, Robert Millikan and Clinton Davisson.[2] Noted gadfly and inventor of the catchphrase conspicuous consumption, Thorsten Veblen, taught economics there.[3] But the Chicago School of Pragmatism - headed by the University's philosophy, psychology, and pedagogy department's chair during 1894-1904, John Dewey - probably influenced Betty Munger's development the most.[4]

University of Chicago, 1902-06

Dewey and other Chicago professors under his influence spoke out for female suffrage, progressive education, humanism, world peace, and other social issues. George Herbert Mead pioneered the symbolic interactionist school of sociology, fronting the idea that the human self arises solely out of social processes.[5] The social psychologist James Hayden Tufts defended liberal and progressive democracy, introducing pragmatism into the theory of international law.[6] Edward Scribner Ames,[7] James R. Angell and Addison Webster Moore[8] also contributed to the advance of pragmatism in philosophy and religion. All taught at Chicago during the years Betty Munger attended.

1906

Nor was Chicago the only locus of Progressivism during those years. Robert La Follette occupied the Governor's office in nearby Wisconsin - raising taxes on corporations, setting up railroad and conservation commissions, and signing laws to control lobbyists, banks, and election procedures - while Betty was at University. Progressives in states across the nation worked to reform elections, commerce, labor laws and social welfare conditions; and, of course, Teddy Roosevelt was President of the United States.[11]

After graduation, Betty Munger taught high school and did her own settlement work in Chicago.[12] She worked in hospitals with the Red Cross during the First World War,[13] wrote some articles for a scientific magazine and finally "stumbled, quite by accident," into corrections.[14] A subsequent newspaper account relates:

Betty Munger on left, date unknown

[I]t was a Cedar Rapids woman, the late Miss Elizabeth Cock, teacher in Washington high school for many years, who first led her into this type of social work. [...] It happened in the early post-war days when she made a luncheon engagement with Miss Cock, who was spending the summer on the staff of the New Jersey State Home for Girls at Trenton. Miss Cock casually suggested that Miss Munger come over to see the excitement, for the place was a hotbed of unfavorable conditions with almost daily riots and general insurrection. [...] She accepted the invitation, offered to "lend a hand" for a couple of months if she could be of any help, and [...] stayed there for five years as assistant superintendent.[15]

The superintendent at Trenton, Mary Belle Harris, another University of Chicago graduate, held a doctorate from that institution in Sanskrit and originally worked as an archeologist.[16] She taught classes at the Hull House settlement during her university years and met another remarkable woman there, Katharine Bement Davis, who gave vital assistance to W.E.B. DuBois' early research through her own settlement house work in Philadelphia and went on to become the first woman to receive a doctorate in political economy cum laude at Chicago, in 1900, at the age of forty. The very next year, Dr. Davis began a 13-year tour as superintendent of New York's newly opened Bedford Hills reformatory for women; in 1914, her appointment as New York City Correction Commissioner made her the first woman ever to run a major branch of that city's government.[17]

Katharine Davis pioneered fusion of progressive reform with gender-specific correctional practice, though favorable mention also belongs to Kate Barnard, Commissioner of the Oklahoma Department of Charities and Corrections during 1907-1915: the inspiration for 30 reform statutes in the legislature there and first woman in the nation elected to statewide office under exclusively male suffrage.[18] In all fairness to men, the newly-formed National Prison Association's 1870 Declaration of Principles put reformation as the principal goal of imprisonment, recommending educational programming, prisoner classification, indeterminate sentencing and other inducements to good behavior; the New York penal administrator Zebulon Brockway, a guiding light behind these innovations, also fronted the refreshing idea that correctional personnel be chosen specifically for potential fitness as upright role models.[19] Built against the parsimony, inertia, and prejudice of legislatures and electorates, the luster of reforming women's careers is not diminished by recognizing their achievements shared in a general advance of the field.

Trenton, 1923

Many years later, in fact, a myth arose claiming Betty Munger, Dr. Harris and Dr. Davis jointly first discovered the principle of classification while studying conditions at Trenton around 1918,[20] but the historical record suggests they simply implemented methods already firmly established at Bedford Hills, Elmira and other institutions. Harris worked earlier, under then-Commissioner Davis, superintending similar physical and procedural reforms at the women's workhouse on Blackwell's Island in New York City.[21] But more useful than knowing who did what first when, would be pondering how Davis, Harris and Munger managed to attract so much favorable and informed press coverage throughout their careers - like the detailed account of newly instituted classification procedures at Trenton found in a 1923 Newark Evening News article aptly entitled "Reform of the Wayward Based on Understanding."[22]

Favorable press and public pressure played roles in another significant reform Betty Munger helped plan, if not implement, during those years: establishment of the Federal Industrial Institute for Women at Alderson, West Virginia, in 1927.[23] While Mary B. Harris' work as first superintendent of that facility is quite well known, the influence of another pioneering woman in this - and other federal prison reforms of the era - is less acknowledged. The Kansan Mabel Walker Willebrandt, first woman to serve an extended term as Assistant Attorney General of the United States (1921-1929),[24] fought tirelessly for necessary appropriations, earning recognition in the press by turns as "First Legal Lady of the Land," "Mrs. Firebrand," "Prohibition Portia," and "the most notorious woman in America," among other charming sobriquets.[25] More to the point for reform-minded individuals of today, the crucial factor of public awareness and pressure in governmental reform remains inescapable. One recent commentator observed that

Alderson prison was the culmination of the vision and work of women in twenty-one national organizations. The American Association of University Women, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, the American Federation of Teachers, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the League of Women Voters, the Republican and Democratic National Committees, and the national Women’s Christian Temperance Union were among them.[26]

Rather than follow Dr. Harris to Alderson, Betty Munger undertook a new challenge in 1926, leaving the reins of New Jersey correctional progressivism in the able hands of Edna Mahan, whose career at the Clinton Farms reformatory extended for forty years after her arrival in 1928.[27] As secretary of the National Committee on the Care and Training of Delinquent Women and Girls,[28] Betty inspected facilities around the country and the State Farm for Women at Niantic, Connecticut, caught her eye. Established in 1917 - again, only "after years of work by women's clubs and organizations" - with a mere $50,000 grant from the legislature to purchase three contiguous farms, renovate the existing buildings and remunerate staff, the facility was immediately overwhelmed with frequently diseased and/or pregnant wartime "camp-followers" and chronic alcoholics cared for by a largely volunteer administration.[29] Finding "five rickety wooden farm houses" sheltering 250 inmates, Betty Munger recognized "a job that must be done."[30]

Industrial Building, 1930

Over the next fourteen years, four new dormitories, industrial and administrative buildings, a maternity ward and nursery, a receiving hospital, cafeteria, laundry, cannery, piggery, storehouse, central sewage disposal plant, and machine shed were constructed,[31] partly with federal PWA funding.

Niantic nursery, 1941

"It's hard to get funds from a bunch of male legislators for an institution of this kind," [Betty Munger] said, "because it doesn't have much emotional appeal [....] So the first time I went to that body for money I asked for a hospital to care for the 60 to 65 illegitimate babies born here every year. That had 'appeal'".[32]

Even the gutting of a $40,000 dormitory by fire in 1937 worked suspiciously - or luckily - to the institution's benefit, since there were no injuries, most of the first-floor's furnishings were salvaged before the fire could spread, and funds for the fully-insured building's replacement had already been appropriated by the legislature.[33]

Fenwick Hall, 1937

Fenwick Hall, 1962

In the best tradition of feminist progressivism, Niantic featured vocational, educational and recreational programming in an atmosphere conducive to self-directed discipline. Inmates tended its 1000-acre expanse and by 1932 the Farm - with the associated State Prison for Women established there in 1930 - was largely self-sufficient in food supplies. "Beef, veal, fowl, duck, lamb, pork, whole milk, skim milk, butter, cream, eggs, ice, vegetables and fruits" produced by inmate labor reduced the facilities' dietary budget per diner that year to eight cents a day.[34]

1940s

1940s

1944

1944

Not only sweetness and light, of course, reigned at Niantic, though the staff made a point of encouraging positive optimism among its wards. Then, as now, high proportions of new inmates were diseased, ill-educated, illiterate and/or mentally suspect. A 1946 report observed

Receiving Building, 1930

Of the women sentenced to the State Farm, about one-third are said to be infected with venereal diseases, about one-fourth are in an extremely expectant condition and have to be delivered at the farm, more than one-third are mental defectives, some are crippled, many are suffering from alcoholism, others are victims of drugs, still others have psychopathic personalities or are classed as incorrigibles [.... M]ore than half of the women sent to the State Farm are said to have a mental age of less than 12 years.[37]

Even the unhappy occasion of escape attempts prompted a new approach in the spirit of progressive pragmatism. As Betty Munger herself remarked in 1941:

At Niantic, we have come to regard escapes - or rather attempted escapes, because few ever get very far - as all in the day's work and regard them as a normal manifestation. In the old days there were severe penalties for these attempts - mostly borrowed from the juvenile institutions. The hair was cut very short and a distinctive dress, sometimes red and sometimes a dingy brown, would be worn after perhaps a month of isolation. The punishment dragged on and on for months after the offense. We have learned, happily, that severity of punishment never is a real deterrent. Now we simply treat the offender, upon her return, as we would any new admission, with the usual two weeks' quarantine and nothing more. Lest anyone question the wisdom of this procedure, we can testify to the fact that we have had fewer attempts at escape than ever we had under the old method.[38]

Of slightly more than 1600 new commitments during six representative fiscal years available to this reporter (1929-30, 1933-34, 1945-46), eight successful escapes were registered among 56 attempts.[39]

A few passing hints on larger social problems beyond the scope of this brief study follow. The racial makeup of inmate populations during Betty Munger's generation, for one thing, differed markedly from today's. While African American women currently form nearly 50 percent of total female inmate populations nationwide,[40] they represented only 12 percent of those in women's reformatories during 1921;[41] during the fiscal year ending in 1933 at Niantic, only 18 of 175 new commitments were black.[42]

Combining these statistics with the 888 percent rise in drug offending women committed to state institutions during the decade before 1996,[43] one may be tempted to join those indicting the War on Drugs as an instrument of racism: since African Americans represent 14 percent of America's drug users, but 35 percent of arrests, 55 percent of convictions, and 75 percent of incarcerations for drug offenses today.[44] But blaming racism for the Drug War - or vice versa - leads only to vicious circles; both evils must be attacked on their own demerits. Of the original 174 mostly white women prisoners at Alderson, after all, 68 percent violated drug laws (fewer than 9 percent were Prohibition violators).[45] Sexism and the far more pervasive racism of the 1920s apparently led, paradoxically, to lower imprisonment rates for female African Americans: women being committed mostly for morals or public order offenses (like "lascivious carriage" or "manifest danger") that would never send a man to prison and African American women being widely perceived incapable of reform in those spheres.[46]

Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1930

Both racism and the Drug War may be profitably viewed - with the growing gap between rich and poor in this country wider than at any time since the Hoover administration[47] - as parts of a much larger social problem. Marxist feminists aptly note progressivist penology's Katharine Davises, Mary Harrises and Betty Mungers all hailed from privileged upper middle class backgrounds;[48] even a contemporary newspaper account of a classification hearing at the Trenton facility during 1923 perfectly captured the underlying class assumptions at work: "The white ruffled curtains swayed softly in the breeze and the afternoon sun glinted across Dr. Harris's grand piano and caught the reflection of a lovely blue bowl filled with asters on a nearby table."[49] A vision of social superiors condescending to shepherd less fortunate wayward sisters back into the fold of bourgeois patriarchy positively drips from this description.

Even as junior partners defending sexist social institutions, pioneering feminist progressives battled to justify not only the establishment of separate and humane penal facilities for women, but to prove women themselves capable of administering those facilities. Women today will doubtless not be surprised to hear Betty Munger described by an otherwise glowingly laudatory home-town newspaper account in 1924 - after over twenty years of general feminist advances and success as penal adminstrators nationwide - as "an unusually attractive young woman who has rare charm of manner and who, one would suspect, presided over a home of her own and cultivated a flower garden instead of bothering her pretty head about prisons[.]"[50] Women today might not even be surprised to learn a principal eulogizer at her 1963 memorial service thought it high praise to remark: "I remember Dr. John Goss, one of her Boardmembers, saying one day at luncheon, 'It is stimulating to see Miss Munger in action. Her mind works like a man's.'"[51]

Passport photo, 1930

This last quote leads quite naturally into one final aside about general social problems, then and now. The progressivist reforming career of Miriam Van Waters, Superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Framingham from 1932-1957, nearly ended in 1949 (two years after Betty Munger's retirement from Niantic) when sensational charges of lax administration at the facility, including widespread homosexual prostitution - with suggestions Superintendent Waters herself might be gay - arose and were aired in extended public hearings.[52] With debates raging even today over the Constitutional standing of gay persons in America, the example of Betty Munger - whose perpetually mannish attire, failure to marry, and lifelong devotion to the welfare and education of other women raises at least the appearance, if nothing else, of a possible lesbian orientation - ought to give pause to anyone pretending to judge the mysteries of the human heart.

According to an old social truism, things tend to develop in cycles or spirals, bouncing from one extreme to another in self-correcting bouts of action, reaction and return. The proverb about pendulums swinging too far expresses a homely wisdom justifying, among other things, the two-party system in American politics. The history of American corrections shows its yin and yang, as well.

That peculiarly American institution, the penitentiary - like the two-party system - hails from the earliest days of the Republic. A renovated copper mine in Connecticut, East Granby's Old Newgate, hosted the nation's first state prison in 1790;[53] the Eastern Pennsylvania State Penitentiary - a Quaker-inspired institution where monk-like silence and strict isolation reigned - followed soon thereafter.[54] A cynic or "hardnosed realist" might conclude recent internationally-denounced advances in supermaximum custody arrangements here[55] represented the ultimate goal of American corrections from the very beginning, since an unbroken history of maximum security construction stretches from Eastern State through Auburn, Sing Sing, Elmira, Attica and Alcatraz to Marion.[56]

Mary B. Harris

But the cynics' and hardnosed realists' Achilles' heel knows secure custody can only be a precondition, not an ultimate goal, of effective corrections. After the Civil War and up until World War Two, more proactive rehabilitative standards came to the fore in this country, largely through the efforts of feminist progressives like Betty Munger, her mentors and colleagues. Mary Belle Harris probably stated the case most succinctly, when she said:

Correctional institutions exist for the protection of society, just as hospitals do...if hospitals, instead of trying to cure patients, returned them to the community, carrying not only the original disease but also infected with all the ailments of the other patients, society would rise in its wrath and demand a reform...When it is a question of improving our treatment of prisoners, the public scoffs...and allows its jails and prisons to breed and disseminate crime and disease.[57]

Unfortunately, postwar McCarthyism, upheavals of the Civil Rights and Vietnam War eras, ever-burgeoning fronts of the War on Drugs, budgetary constraints and steadily lengthening sentences led to abandonment of many hard-won progressive gains in treatment and services, particularly for women. Simplistic one-size-fits-all mandatory minimum legislation and other get-tough measures stripped judges and correctional officials of discretion formerly used as powerful incentives to good behavior and reform within facilities. Finally, the United States overtook Russia as the globe's most incarcerating nation per capita,[58] holding 22% of all the world's prisoners[59] and spending more every year on prison construction than the building of universities and colleges.[60]

But the very same reality that justified rollbacks in correctional services over two generations ago - constraints on the public budget - also makes the impulse to endless new construction self-limiting: repeal of mandatory minimums, restored discretion in parole requirements, and new provisions for treatment, rather than incarceration, of drug offenders are proceeding in at least half the states' capitols today.[61] In Betty Munger's Connecticut, promising recommendations to expand community-based treatment and other alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders are only weeks away from final submission to the legislature.[62] Studies and innovations by the Massachusetts Public Health Association and the Hampden County Correctional Center are finding ways to reduce costs, improve inmate health care and educate the public on vital public health impacts of conditions at correctional facilities.[63]

China Relief, 1940s

"Pragmatism," William James wrote of the Chicago School mentioned above,

asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"[64]

Betty Munger and her fellow-disciples in penological Pragmatism offered no starry-eyed fantasies to the world; they worked under Depression and wartime constraints and still showed significant progress, in both conditions and results. Time will always be on the side of progressive reform, because the bottom line ultimately favors methods that produce results.

When illiterate offenders learn to read, recidivism drops;[65] when literate offenders attend college courses, ditto.[66] When drug offenders get residential or outpatient treatment, recidivism drops and the state saves up to tens of thousands of dollars per inmate per year in custodial costs.[67] When parole requirements liberalize and eligible low-risk offenders divert to community-based programs, recidivism drops and the public purse benefits.[68]

At the American Prison Association congress in 1939, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Sanford Bates, declared: "Both here and abroad, the women's and girls' institutions of America are acknowledged to be on a distinctly higher plane of management than those for men and boys." Female administrators were generally acknowledged as better prepared and more likely to follow careers in corrections than men. As Betty Munger remarked at the time, institutions for women enjoyed at least one particular advantage not found in men's facilities: smaller populations.

APA Congress, 1933

"With smaller groups, we can take the time to study each case and follow up recommendations made for each individual," she said. "We see each woman oftener than is possible in the men's institutions, and we can check on her progress. Under these circumstances, conditions are more favorable in every respect; we can carry out experiments and work out standards for our work."[69]

Some very practical truths in this observation remain relevant for corrections officials, legislators, governors, judges and involved electorates, today and into the foreseeable future. Progressivist administrative practices - considering the offender, not the offense;[70] taking genuine and understanding interest in the individual prisoner's welfare and future, in both treatment and discipline:[71] as Betty Munger put it, not "making an issue of everything that happens, and thus stir[ring] up the feelings of the entire group"[72] - helped the Niantic State Farm achieve an eight percent recidivism rate during the 1930s and early '40s[73] and can still improve conditions in prisons, schools, factories, offices and families today. They are not principles just for women only, but for everyone.

1934

Though conditions and services for women in prisons - both personnel and inmates - still require serious attention,[74] the time has long passed, when female penologists needed to struggle to establish (and prove themselves capable of administering) even gender-specific institutions. About 20 percent of the states' corrections departments - including Betty Munger's Connecticut - feature women at the helm, today;[75] women formed nearly 25 percent of the entire national workforce of corrections officers, jailers and bailiffs in 2002.[76] With women flying F-16s, performing neurosurgery, and presiding over major nation-states, prospects for feminism are expanding beyond simple liberation of the female sex in the workplace, home and public forum.

The full liberation of women implies a simultaneous liberation of men. More than simply teaching women how to become aggressive competitors, athletes, generals and presidents, it can teach men how to become helpmates, nurses, secretaries, homemakers and attentive parents: reintegrating the species in a new paradigm of cooperation and trust, beyond patriarchy or its opposite. One day's ridiculous idealism becomes the next day's only hope against dwindling resources, population pressures and nuclear weaponry: legitimate prospects for feminism may include an entire planet without hunger, preventable disease, illiteracy, poverty or war.

Niantic, 1963

American corrections today faces extraordinary challenges in the workplace and in the nation's capitols, streets and schools. The never-ending struggle to establish and maintain safe, humane, and effective treatment and custody relations - including efforts to rationalize and improve the law itself - vitally impacts the future of our whole society and, by extension, the world. A potentially crucial role for women in this ongoing process - inspired by significant progressivist reformers of the not-so-distant past and their own best judgment and vision - must be self-evident.

Marshall Munger Kerr of Springfield, Virginia, Elizabeth M. Munger's grandnephew, served during 1972-73 in the US Army-Military Police Corps as a Correctional Specialist, Commander's Clerk, and Social Work/Psychology Specialist at the Mannheim Stockade under LTC Paul W. Grossheim (Director, Iowa DOC, 1988-1992). [Back to Text]

Notes

1. History of Linn County, 1911, pp.324-28; J.B. Munger, The Munger Book: Something of the Mungers, 1639-1914, Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1915, p.383. [Back to Text]
   
2. University of Chicago News Office, Notable University of Chicago Alumni. [Back to Text]
   
3. Stanley K. Schultz, Veblen, Thorstein. [Back to Text]
   
4. The Pragmatism Cybrary, The Chicago School of Pragmatism; John Dewey, American Pragmatist. [Back to Text]
   
5. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931). [Back to Text]
   
6. The Pragmatism Cybrary, James Hayden Tufts (1862-1942). [Back to Text]
   
7. The Pragmatism Cybrary, Edward Scribner Ames (1870-1958). [Back to Text]
   
8. The Pragmatism Cybrary, Addison W. Moore. [Back to Text]
   
9. Margaret Luft, About Jane Addams Hull House; Hull House Museum, About Jane Addams. [Back to Text]
   
10. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Young, Ella Flagg; Daniel Schugurensky, Ella Flagg Young, first female superintendent of a major city school system. [Back to Text]
    
11. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Progressivism. [Back to Text]
    
12. "How Connecticut Treats its Women Prisoners," Hartford Daily Courant, 29 Jan 1933. [Back to Text]
    
13. Mrs. Weld Morgan, Elizabeth M Munger Memorial Address, September 22, 1963. [Back to Text]
    
14. "Due to Retire, Elizabeth Munger Can Look Back at 20 Years With Reassurance About Prison Uplift," New Haven Register, 29 Dec 1946. [Back to Text]
    
15. Alice Davidson Kaselow, "Cedar Rapids Woman Modernizes and Humanizes Prison in East," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 Apr 1940. [Back to Text]
    
16. Clare Hanrahan, "Alderson: Reclaiming the Vision," Western North Carolina Woman, volume 2, issue 1, 2003. [Back to Text]
    
17. Thomas C. McCarthy, "Correction's Katharine Bement Davis: New York City's Suffragist Commissioner," 1997. [Back to Text]
    
18. History of Corrections in Oklahoma, "Commissioners of Charities and Corrections." [Back to Text]
    
19. McCarthy, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
20. Morgan, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
21. McCarthy, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
22. "Reform of the Wayward Based on Understanding," Newark Evening News, Saturday, October 27, 1923. [Back to Text]
    
23. Kaselow, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
24. The Library of Congress, "Women Justices, Judges, and Attorneys." [Back to Text]
    
25. Esther Heffernan, "The Alderson Years," Federal Prisons Journal, Spring 1992, pp.21-25; The Frederick A. Cook Society, "The Woman Assistant U.S. Attorney General and the Prisoner at Leavenworth, 1928-29." [Back to Text]
    
26. Hanrahan, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
27. Judy Peet, "Edna Mahan clung to her ideal," Star-Ledger, May 23, 2004 . [Back to Text]
    
28. Courant, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
29. Register, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
30. "Cedar Rapids Woman Modernizes and Humanizes Prison in East," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 7 Apr 1940. [Back to Text]
    
31. "Miss Munger Honored on Tenth Anniversary as State Farm Head," New London Day, 6 Jul 1936. [Back to Text]
    
32. Gazette, 1940, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
33. "$40,000 Fire at State Farm at Niantic," New London Day, 28 Dec 1937. [Back to Text]
    
34. Courant, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
35. "State Farm Gives Historic Revue, Parade and Picnic," Source unknown, 5 Jul 1935; Tracey T. Beckworth, "Defense by Conservation Made Theme of Annual Fair at State Farm for Women," New London Evening Day, 27 Sep 1941. [Back to Text]
    
36. "Pageant Repeated at State Farm for Women," New London Evening Day, 23 Aug 1934. [Back to Text]
    
37. Register, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
38. Elizabeth Munger, "Passing Reflections," Prison World, Jul-Aug 1941. [Back to Text]
    
39. State of Connecticut, Public Document No. 67, Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut State Farm for Women to the Governor, June 30, 1930, p.42; ibid., June 30, 1934, p.20; ibid., June 30, 1946, p.36. [Back to Text]
    
40. Barbara Bloom, Ph.D., Barbara Owen, Ph.D., and Stephanie Covington, Ph.D., "Gender-Responsive Strategies: Research, Practice, and Guiding Principles for Women Offenders," NIC, 2003, p.2. [Back to Text]
    
41. Nancy Kurshan, "Women and Imprisonment in the u.s.: History and Current Reality." [Back to Text]
    
42. State of Connecticut, Public Document No. 67, Biennial Report of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut State Farm for Women to the Governor, June 30, 1934, p.21. [Back to Text]
    
43. Bloom, et.al., op.cit., p.5. [Back to Text]
    
44. Manning Marable, "Racism, Prisons, and the Future of Black America," Dec 2000. [Back to Text]
    
45. Heffernan, op.cit.. [Back to Text]
    
46. Kurshan, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
47. Thomas Kostigen, "Growing Wealth Gap Rates an 'Orange Alert'," CBS.MarketWatch.com, 1 Jun 2004 . [Back to Text]
    
48. Kurshan, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
49. Evening News, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
50. "Elizabeth Munger Reads Paper At N.E.A. Conference, Chicago; Doing Educational Work In East," Cedar Rapids Republican, Sunday, March 2, 1924. [Back to Text]
    
51. Morgan, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
52. Leslie Endicott, "Behind Prison Walls," Stanford Magazine, Jan-Feb 1997. [Back to Text]
    
53. "Old Newgate Prison," East Granby Historical Society. [Back to Text]
    
54. "Eastern State Penitentiary: Timeline." [Back to Text]
    
55. "Supermax Prisons," MacArthur Justice Center, University of Chicago Law School; "Out of Sight: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in the United States," Human Rights Watch, February 2000; "Supermaximum Security Facilities," Amnesty International, 8 March 1999. [Back to Text]
    
56. "The Evolution of the New York Prison System," New York Correction History Society. [Back to Text]
    
57. Angela Gaddis, "Self Directed Learning," Correctional Service of Canada, Literacy 2000 Conference: Towards Reintegration. [Back to Text]
    
58. "U.S. prison population largest in world," The Baltimore Sun, 1 June 2003. [Back to Text]
    
59. "Global Comparisons," The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry. [Back to Text]
    
60. ibid, "Budget Priorities: Education vs. Incarceration." [Back to Text]
    
61. William DiMascio, "An Enlightened Prison Policy Would Save Money and Lives," Scranton Times Tribune, 21 Dec 2003. [Back to Text]
    
62. "A Report to the Governor and Legislature," The Alternatives to Incarceration Advisory Committee, State of Connecticut, 1 February 2004. [Back to Text]
    
63. "A Public Health Model for Correctional Health Care." [Back to Text]
    
64. "Pragmatism," 1907. [Back to Text]
    
65. "Correctional Education Facts," The National Institute for Literacy. [Back to Text]
    
66. "Incarceration & Its Consequences," The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry. [Back to Text]
    
67. "Coalition For Women Prisoners: Proposals For Reform In New York State 2002," Women in Prison Project, The Correctional Association of New York. [Back to Text]
    
68. Alternatives, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
69. "State Parole Cooperation Hailed by Prison Farm Head," Newspaper source unknown, 1939. [Back to Text]
    
70. Courant, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
71. Lani Jones, "State Farm Head for 21 Years, She Hasn't Seen Dozen Bad Women," Newspaper source unknown, 1947. [Back to Text]
    
72. Parole Cooperation, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
73. Munger, op.cit. [Back to Text]
    
74. Bloom, et.al., op.cit., p.76. [Back to Text]
    
75. Brian A. Garnett, Director of External Affairs, Connecticut Department of Correction, personal communication with author, 1 Sep 2004. [Back to Text]
    
76. "Nontraditional Occupations for Women in 2002," Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor. [Back to Text]

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    Additional Elizabeth Maria Munger Resources

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